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Nathanael Gratias Sumaktoyo

Nathanael Sumaktoyo is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science, the University of Notre Dame. As of August 2018, he will start a position as a postdoctoral fellow with the Global Religion Research Initiative, the University of Notre Dame.
His dissertation examines how social relationships influence individuals' political behavior and attitudes, particularly when it comes to religious tolerance. He seeks to explain why scholars have found lower religious tolerance in Muslim than in non-Muslim countries. He shows that the lower tolerance is driven not only by cultural and institutional factors, but also by high levels of religious bonding or relationships with fellow coreligionists among Muslims in the countries.
He provides evidence for this theory by analyzing a survey of more than 17,000 Muslims in 17 Muslim countries and fielding an original survey experiment in Indonesia. His analysis reveals that religious bonding negatively affects various indicators of religious tolerance among Muslims and that Muslim countries are indeed higher in religious bonding than non-Muslim countries, even after we take into account the countries’ religious compositions, levels of economic development, and institutional restrictions on religion.
On a more general level, Nathanael's work have covered a variety of topics, including religion and politics, political psychology, voting behavior, religious freedom, social and political tolerance, and political networks. Methodologically, he is interested in experimental methods, causal inference, Bayesian analysis, and simulation techniques.